Wolf

Here are some initial reviews of the music press regarding the Beatles' singles releases:

PLEASE PLEASE ME

I think that is better than their last record Love Me Do: more quality in this one. I think that it should do a lot better than Love Me Do. A lot of people do not like it but I do.

Janelle Nicholls in O`ll Give It Foive, Melody Maker, January 1963

FROM ME TO YOU

The Beatles have made it again! Today, the big beat boys from Liverpool have smashed their own disc sales record and leapt into the hit parade at Number 19. The song From Me To You is another composition by the hit-writing Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney Melody Maker, April 1963

SHE LOVES YOU

The lyrics are fatuous and erratic. If this is The Beatles, they`re heading downwards. Although there was something about their other records that was good, they have descended to the general mire.

Clifford Beven, Melody Maker, August 1963

I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND

A sizzling seven from the unbeatable Beatles, who leaped effortlessly to Number 1 in the Top 50 this week with their million-seller I Want To Hold Your Hand. It pushes their first million-seller She Loves You into second place, an unequalled achievement in the record world.

Melody Maker, December 1963

A HARD DAY`S NIGHT

On this new one, the instrumental sound is very unusual. I like it very much, really. It`s The Beatles, and it will be very big. But you would never have thought of A Hard Day`s Night for a song title, would you?

Bob Welch, Melody Maker, July 1964

TICKET TO RIDE/YES IT IS

The depth of sound which the Beatles create is quite fantastic, and is again in evidence in Ticket To Ride. It bounds along at a fast pace and with tremendous drive, with tambourines for added effect, and reaches about the same tempo as I Feel Fine. Jon takes the solo, aided by Paul`s colourful harmonies and occasional falsetto in some passages. Catchy, too, you soon pick up the tune. Yes, they`d done it again! Pace drops in a slow rockballad for Yes It Is. Melodic, with a plaintive quality. John leads with harmony supplied by Paul and George. Both sides Lennon-McCartney compositions, of course.

The New Musical Express, April 1965.

HELP!

They always find a new chord progression. There is some pretty obvious double-tracking there. It doesn`t strike you as immediately as their last one, but it`s certainly very clever and certain to be a hit.

Keith Relf, Melody Maker, July 1965

DAY TRIPPER

I liked this immediately. The trouble is, what can you say about The Beatles? They just go on producing great records.

Eric Burdon, Melody Maker, December 1965

PAPERBACK WRITER

Towards Indian pop using waking harmony and dipping bass lines. A very swinging track with a lot of impact, some vicious sounds and almost disconcerting vocal harmonies.

Melody Maker, June 1966

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER/PENNY LANE

I like the other side best (Penny Lane). I hated both of them first of all and thought they`d gone down the pan, but Penny Lane gets better every time I hear it.

Alan Blakely, Melody Maker, February 1967

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

The message is love and I hope everyone in the whole world manages to get it. The flip, Baby You`re A Richman, shows you the kind of wealth that will be yours if you get the message.

Nick Davies, Melody Maker, July 1967

HELLO GOODBYE/I AM THE WALRUS

No doubt the more times you hear Hello Goodbye and I Am The Walrus the more the subtleties come to light.

Nick Jones, Melody Maker, November 1967

LADY MADONNA

The Beatles` cycle turns full cycle, and here we are back to square one again with a rocker! Mind you, this isn`t the raw, blatant rock of the group`s early days, it`s controlled, polished and impeccably produced. On other words, it`s up-dated sophisticated rock!

The New Musical Express, March 1968

HEY JUDE/REVOLUTION

It is not staggering, but it could grow on you. The slow, heavy piano-ridden beat, sensuous vocals and nice thumpy drums from Ringo, plus a sad souful atmosphere, lead on to the conclusion "Top Hole".

Chris Welch, Melody Maker, August 1968

GET BACK

Always the same reaction to a new Beatles record: when it comes out you are a bit disappointed, then after five plays you realize how good it is. This is very simple, with a Chuck Berry guitar riff going, chk chk chk.

John Peel, Melody Maker, April 1969

THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO

One of the most emotionally moving songs ever to come from the pen of Lennon and McCartney, the song nearly brought a tear to my cynical eye and the thing that stopped the flood was the driving, raw rock to which the words are set. John`s lyric tells the poignant and true story of people`s attitudes to John and Yoko and their marriage and honeymoon, but as I`ve said, the tension is relieved by the driving rock backing of guitar, basd and drums. It really is a stormer and a great one to dance to. I presume it had to be released now because of the topical lyric but the fact that the Beatles are currently at No. 1 with Get Back must distract some sales.

The New Musical Express, May 1969

SOMETHING/COME TOGETHER

What I was waiting for was the guitar solo because George Harrison is just about the only guitar player I know of who can play a solo so it doesn`t sound as though it is planned, and I like the drummer, whoever he is.

Keef Hartley, Melody Maker, November 1969

George Harrison`s first solo showcase in a Beatles single. And a real quality hunk of pop it is, a slowish ballad, it has a rather wistful feel that`s heightened by the inherent plaintive timbre in George`s voice plus the strident lead guitar which exudes a mean moody quality. But despite the relative slowness of the pace, there`s also a walloping beat and an orchestral scoring in which the string section is prominent. Judging by this disc, I think it`s a pity that George isn`t featured more regularly as a singer because he certainly has a highly individual approach. Regarding the song itself, written by Harrison, of course, it doesn`t have the instant mass appeal we associate with many Beatles numbers. It`s a song that grows on you, and mark my words, it will in a big way!

Wolf

I had the special NME-Beatles issue with all the reviews of the Beatles' albums, but I gave that one away. I am not sure if I posted it somewhere on some message board (which would mean that I'd have it somewhere on my PC, but the PC broke down a while ago and lots of stuff is lost). I will search for it, should I find those reviews, I'll post them here.

In case you've been in New Guinea or something, you ought to be told that the Beatles have a new album out. It is called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and even before its release on June 2 it was the subject of all kinds of published and unpublished rumors. Afterward, the information barrage was overwhelming. Capitol Records sent out an extraordinary feature, spiced with terms like "modals," "atonality," and--egad!--"bowels" and casting aspersions upon the "Tin Pan Alley-spawned lyrical clich&#233;." There were stories in Life (in which Paul McCartney, to the surprise of no one and the shock of quite a few, revealed that he had sampled the dreaded lysergic acid diethylamide; he was seconded quickly by John and George, but Ringo, lovely Ringo, has remained silent), Time (in which George Martin, the group's producer, who has a degree in music and is thus permitted to be a genius, was singled out as the brains of the operation), and Newsweek (in which the former kings of rock and roll were compared, unpejoratively and in order, to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edith Sitwell, Charlie Chaplin, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and T.S. Eliot--and not to Elvis Presley or even Bob Dylan). The trades bristled with excited little pieces that always seemed to contain the word "artistic." And in The New York Times Richard Goldstein put the album down and was almost lynched.

Goldstein, who has had his own story in Newsweek, is the best-known critic of pop in the country. Like any rising star, he engendered the inevitable ressentiment, always masquerading, of course, as contempt for the phony, the sellout, etc.. I often disagree with Goldstein, but a sellout he is not. He is unfailingly honest and about as malevolent as Winnie-the-Pooh. There are very few "pop critics" who can match him even occasionally for incisiveness, perspective, and wit. Goldstein was disappointed with Sgt. Pepper. After an initial moment of panic, I wasn't. In fact, I was exalted by it, although a little of that has worn off. Which is just the point. Goldstein may have been wrong, but he wasn't that wrong. Sgt. Pepper is not the world's most perfect work of art. But that is what the Beatles' fans have come to assume their idols must produce.

It all started in December, 1965, when they released Rubber Soul, an album that for innovation, tightness, and lyrical intelligence was about twice as good as anything they or anyone else (except maybe the Stones) had done previously. In June, 1966, Capitol followed with The Beatles--"Yesterday" . . . and Today, comprising both sides of three singes plus extra cuts from the English versions of Rubber Soul and Revolver. The Beatles (perhaps as a metaphor for this hodgepodge, which was not released in England) provided a cover that depicted Our Boys in bloody butcher aprons, surrounded by hunks of meat and dismembered doll. The powers yowled, the cover was replaced as a reported cost of $250,000, and then in August the American Revolver went on sale. That did it. Revolver was twice as good and four times as startling as Rubber Soul, with sound effects, Oriental drones, jazz bands, transcendentalist lyrics, all kinds of rhythmic and harmonic surprises, and a filter that made John Lennon sound like God singing through a foghorn.

Partly because the ten-month gap between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper was so unprecedented, the album was awaited in much the same spirit as installments of Dickens must have been a century ago. Everyone was a little edgy: Could they do it again? The answer: yes and no. Sgt. Pepper is a consolidation, more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial. Part of Goldstein's mistake, I think, has been to allow all the filters and reverbs and orchestral effects and overdubs to deafen him to the stuff underneath, which was pretty nice, and to fall victim to overanticipation. Although Goldstein still insists he was right, I attribute his review to a failure of nerve.

Plus, perhaps, a predilection for folk music. Sgt. Pepper, four months in gestation, is the epitome of studio rock, and Goldstein wasn't entirely wrong when he accused it of being "busy, hip and cluttered." It contains nothing as lovely as "In My Life" on Rubber Soul or "Here, There and Everywhere" on Revolver. But no one seems to care. The week after Goldstein's review appeared, Cash Box listed Sgt. Pepper as the best-selling album in the country, a position it has occupied all summer.

Meanwhile, Goldstein himself has become a storm center. The Voice, his home base, published a rebuttal by a guy named Tom Phillips, who works for the Times. (Now who's square?) Goldstein responded with a Voice defense of his review. (Title: "I Lost My Cool Through the New York Times.") Paul Williams, of Crawdaddy, complained that Goldstein "got hung up on his own integrity and attempted to judge what he admittedly [sic] did not understand." (What have you done for rock this week?) And the Times was deluged with letters, many abusive and every last one in disagreement, the largest response to a music review in its history.

The letters are a fascinating testimony to what the Beatles mean to their fans. The correspondents are divided about equally between adolescents and young adults, with age often volunteered as a credential. Needless to say, Goldstein is frequently accused of being Old. (For the record, he is twenty-three. And I am twenty-five.) One common complaint was that Goldstein missed the acronymic implications of a lush little fantasy called "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." (Singers on a trip with pretensions?) Even more common is the indignant avowal that George Harrison's "Within You Without You" did not, as Goldstein averred, "resurrect the very clich&#233;s the Beatles helped bury," and that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," as Sherry Brody, of Brooklyn, put it, "is not like other songs by stupid groups that say I love you and junk like that." (I hope I don't sound condescending. Miss Brody's letter is not only charming--she signs, "Please write back!"--but every bit as perceptive as many of its more ambitious competitors.) Of course, the clich&#233;s in "WYWY" to which Goldstein was referring were not "I love you and junk like that." They were "self-discovery" and "universal love," the kind of homilies that used to make the Beatles giggle, but that Harrison now seems to take seriously.

"WYWY" provides the most convenient launching pad for the textual analyses that almost everyone felt compelled to send off. One writer claimed that a book by William R. Shears (Ringo's persona on the record is "Billy Shears"), called Here It Is, is full of illuminating cross-references. A high-school freshman invoked the album as an example of "tmesis--the appearance of a poem to do credit to its words." Many saw the album as "an attack on middle-class values." Some writers were sure the Beatles had arrived at their current synthesis because, to quote a Juilliard student, "they have refused to prostitute themselves for their fans." But others insisted that Sgt. Pepper was "for the people."

The genius of the Beatles can be found in those last two contradictory suggestions, because both are true. Few of their old fans could have anticipated their present course or wished for it. Yet the Beatles have continued to please more of the old-timers than anyone but they--and the old-timers themselves--could have hoped. They really started the whole long-haired hippie business four years ago, and who knows whether they developed with it or it developed with them? All those pages of analysis are a gauge of how important the Beatles have become to . . . us.

One song on Sgt. Pepper, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," seems to me deliberately one-dimensional, nothing more than a description of a traveling circus. It fits beautifully into the album, which is a kind of long vaudeville show, but I feel almost certain it has no "meaning." Yet one girl, "age fifteen," writes that it presents "life as an eerie perverted circus." Is this sad? silly? horrifying? contemptible? From an adult it might be all four, but from a fifteen-year-old it is simply moving. A good Lennon-McCartney song is sufficiently cryptic to speak to the needs of whoever listens. If a fifteen-year-old finds life "an eerie perverted circus"--and for a fifteen-year-old that is an important perception--then that's what "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" can just as well be about. If you've just discovered universal love, you have reason to find "Within You Without You" "great poetry." It really doesn't matter; if you're wrong, you're right.

One of the nice things the Beatles do for those of us who love them is charge commonplace English with meaning. I want to hold your hand. It's getting better all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Fixing a Hole," to which I alluded just above, is full of just such suggestive phrases. I'll resist temptation and quote only five lines: "And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right/ Where I belong I'm right/ Where I belong./ See the people standing there who disagree and never win/ And wonder why they don't get in my door." This passage not only indicates the interesting things the Beatles are doing with rhyme, skewing their stanzas and dispensing almost completely with traditional song form. It also serves as a gnomic reminder of the limitations of criticism. Allow me to fall into its trap by providing my own paraphrase, viz.: "In matters of interpretation, the important thing is not whether you're `wrong' or `right' but whether you are faithful to your own peculiar stance in the world. Those who insist upon the absolute rectitude of their opinions will never attain a state of enlightenment."

Well, there it is; I've finally done it. Pompous, right? Sorry, I'm just not John Lennon. But like everyone else, I feel compelled to make Our Boys My Boys. The first thirty times I heard "Fixing a Hole," I just listened and enjoyed it, keeping time, singing along, confident that it was obscure beyond my powers to investigate. Then I noticed that all the interpreters were shying away from that song, or making an obvious botch of it, and I couldn't resist the challenge. Now, after several false starts that had me convinced for a while, I think I've got it. It's not surprising that their ideas are so much like my own. That's what they're saying, isn't it?

For, just like Sherry Brody, I have my own Beatles. As far as I'm concerned, "Fixing a Hole" is not like other songs by stupid groups that say I am alienated and junk like that. And I have other prejudices. I can't believe that the Beatles indulge in the simplistic kind of symbolism that turns a yellow submarine into a Nembutal or a banana--it is just a yellow submarine, damn it, an obvious elaboration of John's submarine fixation, first revealed in A Hard Day's Night. I think they want their meanings to be absorbed on an instinctual level, just as their new, complex music can be absorbed on a sensual level. I don't think they much care whether Sgt. Pepper is Great Art or some other moldy fig. And I think they are inordinately fond (in a rather recondite way) of what I call the real world. They want to turn us on, all right--to everything in that world and in ourselves.

What else could a journalist think?

It is time for a progress report on the Monkees, who took a big gamble by releasing an album and a single at about the same time as the big fellas from England. The album, Headquarters, has not done as well as Sgt. Pepper, but "Pleasant Valley Sunday" b/w "Words" is two-sided top ten, whereas "All You Need Is Love" is one-sided.

My original analysis of the group pitted Mike Nesmith (struggling singer, hence good) against Mickey Dolenz (ex-child actor, hence bad). As it turns out, the real baddie seems to be the other ex-child actor, Davy Jones, a repulsive showbiz type, cute as a push button. The rest? Peter Tork is an anxiety-prone phony, Dolenz a likable oaf with a strong voice, and Nesmith still the most talented of the four, which may not be saying much. His "You Just May Be the One" and "Sunny Girlfriend" are by far the best songs on Headquarters and would sound good anywhere.

The Monkees began, if you'll remember, as poor vocalists and no musicians at all, but now, as a note on the album proclaims, they are Doing It Themselves. This means they are venturing live performances. I saw them at Forest Hills, and they stank. That crisp studio sound was weak and ragged on stage, and their Act (they tell the press that the kids won't go for "four dots" anymore) was unbelievably corny. The kids screamed, of course, but the stadium was far from full, and the one lonely rush at the stage quickly stymied by a bored and overstaffed security force. Good signs.

The day when a group could walk into a record company singing last year's top ten and expect to get past the receptionist has passed. "You don't write your own material!" today's receptionist is trained to sneer. "Whatsamatter, you think we're some commercial outfit? You're not creative. Get out."

This problem has been solved neatly by five musicians called the Candymen, who backed Roy Orbison for years before going on alone. For various good reasons they got to a club in New York with two original songs. So they opened their act with a letter-perfect version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," followed by "With a Little Help from My Friends."

Followed by "Gimme Some Lovin'," almost as good as Stevie Winwood.

Followed by "Good Vibrations," which is more than the Beach Boys can do.

Followed by "Thunderball."

Their ambition is to step on stage some night and do all of Sgt. Pepper live, with every studio effect pat. They may succeed. Meanwhile, they are writing their own ma-teerial.

The Mothers of Invention pose the central question of contemporary art, namely: Are you putting me on? Everything about them is ugly. Presiding genius Frank Zappa seems to enjoy ugliness. His apparent motivation is distaste for everything except modern classical music and the alienation effect. "He's really weird," one graduate teenybopper confided to me. "He doesn't even turn on." I guess that says it.

Visually, the Mothers are reminiscent of the Fugs, old enough so all that hair looks more skanky than cute. Musically, they are the Fugs in reverse. The Fugs are poets who perceived the inherent sexuality of rock and decided to go bardic. The Mothers are musicians who learned during long hours in studios and crummy dance-halls that rock was crude and often deracinated. They parody every popular music from thirties-croon to Supremes (no Supremes fan could entirely survive the sight of three hairy freaks prancing from mike to mike in a perfectly hideous and hilarious version of "Baby Love") and their music is the antithesis of soul: wooden beat, trite riffs, inane lyrics. Vocalist Ray Collins can destroy any style, and the musicianship behind him is always precisely awful.

The Mothers are very good on stage, but their records do not bear repeated listening. Both Freak Out!, a double record that is a great bargain at stereo price, and Absolutely Free, conceived as two short oratorios, give the flavor of a Mothers performance. But musical parody can satisfy for just so long, and Zappa's tastes in social satire are less than subtle--the "plastic people" he is always sniping at are an unoriginal and rather stationary target. And when he moves into the aleatory-Var&#232;se-jazz-rock composition that seems to be his only true love, he does not impress my admittedly untrained ear.

I don't mean to be captious, though. See the Mothers if you can. Zappa is very funny, and reed man Bunk Gardner is a great talent, much better than Archie Shepp, whom Gardner professes to admire--along with Herman's Hermits. And if you can't see them, buy a record--the Zappa-designed jacket of Absolutely Free is almost worth the price. Absolutely Free is better integrated; Freak Out! has more music. Your choice.

I want to register a mea culpa on Jefferson Airplane. After repeated forced hearings it is clear my put-down was a bad mistake. The Airplane is one of the best--intense, original, yes, soulful. The success of the Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and of the Doors' "Light My Fire" is heartening. America, you are still out there. . . . On the other hand, I will be disheartened if one of the five singles recently released by Moby Grape--"Omaha" and "Changes" are the best--does not become an enormous hit. The Grape ranks now with the Airplane and the Doors among the new California groups and has the potential to be the best in the country. . . . Camp triumph of the year is "Albert, Albert" by the Bugs ("Albert, Albert, what the heck/ You are just a pain in the neck"). The flip is "Strangler in the Night," by "Albert De Salvo." No, I will not tell you how to get it.

Christgau writes: "A good Lennon-McCartney song is sufficiently cryptic to speak to the needs of whoever listens. . . . It really doesn't matter; if you're wrong, you're right.

It also serves as a gnomic reminder of the limitations of criticism. Allow me to fall into its trap by providing my own paraphrase, viz.: 'In matters of interpretation, the important thing is not whether you're `wrong' or `right' but whether you are faithful to your own peculiar stance in the world. Those who insist upon the absolute rectitude of their opinions will never attain a state of enlightenment.'"_______________________________________________________________________________

Christgau is right in spite of his being wrong with the last statement. The openness to interpretation is the genius of the Beatles--like any great art. His "limitations" of criticism are self-imposed. What critics don't want to admit is that their personal opinions are just that--personal. Especially when it comes to something as mercurial and intuitive as song.

Unfortunately, unless the critic puts on his/her armor of rectitude (of having a "valid" or objectively "justifiable" opinion--this album is good, that one is sh*te), then in our culture dominated by its self-fabrication of the patriarchal monolithic Great Monad we discount the critic. We want judgment--to know that something's "ultimately" good or bad first. Not how it made us feel or what it emotionally/psychically "did" for us. Or the problem raised by the fiction of "ultimate-ness" to begin with.

How can you review a great album after the first or seventh listen? What makes it "great" in the first place beyond your personal connection to it?

this tune (TNK) was infact re-done by Chemical Brothers and Noel gallagher I believe a few years back. Was quite a hit on the dance scene. I

Yeah, Setting Sun that was a great track. Was TNK credited on this track though? Normally it would say in the songwriting credits "contains elements of...". They do sound very similar, especially the drums and vocal track.

Was Revolver well received at the time? I know Sgt. Pepper got much more critical praise when it came out. I think Revolver was somewhat dismissed initially,but got better and better reviews as time went on. It's aged much better than Pepper as far as reviews go.

Speaking as someone who was around at the time (albeit a kid) I dont remember any Beatle album being dismissed, quite the opposite in fact, in England it seemed like the whole populace (under 30) was baying for the next LP, and I remember Revolver as being hailed as another masterpiece.

As for Rays review, theres no harm in giving your honest opinions. In context of the times, there was rivalry, I think John had dismissed the Kinks as garbage if memory serves me well and I think Ray felt badly done to by Pye and The Kinks management, he was writing songs easily as good as Lennon & McCartney but his band were not as universally acknowledged.And when everyone first heard Tomorrow Never Knows in 1966 it did sound like rubbish, pure rubbish with no melody, just a boring repetitive drum beat, hence his disco remark and the possibility that G Martin had had nothing to do with it due to its lack of quality.

Was Revolver well received at the time? I know Sgt. Pepper got much more critical praise when it came out. I think Revolver was somewhat dismissed initially,but got better and better reviews as time went on. It's aged much better than Pepper as far as reviews go.

I was only a kid in 1966 so it all went over my head, but years later my dad (a big Beatles fan) told me about his attending a party just after Revolver had been released and there was quite a buzz going around about it, until the host played it - first time of hearing for many of the guests, apparently - and it got a rather puzzled/disappointed thumbs down. Couldn't dance to it? Not catchy enough? who knows. My theory is that it was their boldest departure from their winning formula to date. A lot of people just weren't ready.

When I first bought a copy (1970s) I remember actually disliking it. At that stage I hadn't heard my dad's party recollection. But it just wasn't "Beatley" to my ears...perhaps because, like so many of my generation, I was weaned on the red and blue albums - which are, respectively, remarkably generous towards Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper. Revolver doesn't get a look in, apart from the ER/YS single - both sides of which were sort of "novelty records" for The Beatles of that time and to my mind less representative of the album's feel and overall sound than either "Paperback Writer" or "Rain".

Revolver didn't capture the zeitgeist in anything like the same way as Sgt. Pepper did the following year; consequently it has dated rather better and has a kind of elusive timelessness which gets the cool kudos from the critics nowadays. For me personally though, there has never been a time when it was as good as, let alone better than, Pepper (or Rubber Soul, for that matter). It did soften up the audience/fan base to be more receptive to experimentation I suppose.